The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Search engine providers derive a large portion of their revenue from advertisements. In order to increase revenue, search engine providers must both attract new users and compel the existing users to look at advertisements. One major factor attracting users to any particular search engine provider has been the quality of search results. However, search engines are rapidly improving the quality of search results and it is conceivable that eventually major search engine providers will not be able to be differentiated on the quality of search results alone.
Search engine providers use approaches based on factors other than the quality of search results in order to attract users. In one prior approach, users were paid to use a certain search engine. However, this approach directly hurt the profitability of the search engine service and was not viable in the long term. In another approach, layouts of search results were altered to direct the user's attention to advertisements. Search engine providers attempted to balance the prominence of search results and advertisements. As a result, search engine providers established an implicit layout standard, where search engine results are presented on the left and the advertisements are presented on the right. Within the implicit layout standard, the designers are faced with a challenge of attracting existing users to pay attention to the advertisements displayed on the right. In some approaches, the advertisements were mixed with the search results; however this had a negative effect on users because it detracted the users from their search task.
Other approaches attempted to alter the advertisements themselves by embedding games or animation. However, bright, flashy advertisements detract users from the main search task and may make the search result page appear unprofessional. In order to increase viewership of text only ads, search engine providers also altered appearance. Search engine providers also attempted to make the advertisements more relevant to users. The advertisements were matched to the users based on the query terms and user profiles. The relevance based approaches all aim at improving the quality of the match of users to advertisements. However, these approaches are limited by the quality of the ads themselves.